11.25.2009

• The (awesome) Groundswell Collective is launching a print journal. And they're looking for submissions on the topic of "crisis folklore": "How we imagine future stories that describe our current time period can give us an alternative glimpse of the cultures we are shaping in the here-and-now." Oops: the deadline is Nov. 30!

There’s a distinct trajectory to Chicago-based photographer Brian Ulrich’s work over the first decade of the new millennium. His focus six or seven years ago -- documentation of overabundant mall environs and big-box stores packed to the rafters with affordably priced synthetic goods – eventually started shifting to the next stage in the lifespan of consumer objects. From the sales floors where “brand-new” promises were proferred, they made their inevitable way to secondary markets like thrift stores where, dirty and tattered, they’re left for those further down the socioeconomic ladder. Today, Ulrich’s lens is trained increasingly on the long tail of this arc: the empty shells of malls shops, car dealerships and megastores that have been abandoned in the wake of economic downturn.

Ulrich’s work is a natural fit for Add-Art: It’s e-commerce, after all, that’s contributing to the demise of bricks-and-mortar stores. And while the ebullient optimism of in-store promos or zany used-car commercials may be fading in suburban Chicago or downtown Detroit, these online ads – banners flashing to attract the eye to home refinancing deals, popping up (or under) to remind us of weight-loss schemes – maintain their focus-group-tested opulence. Temporarily, that realm will be taken over by Ulrich’s images of a teenybopper mall boutique stripped of everything but the neon “Ear Piercing” sign; the branded architecture of a Circuit City store reduced to a still-branded ruin; a blaze-orange “0%” banner, once touting low-low prices at a car dealership, now advertising the showroom’s abandonment.

It’s a bit of visual jujitsu: using the seductive power, placement and vocabulary of online advertising against itself -- to deliver an image that serves as a kind of warning against putting too much faith in the promises of consumerism. In an interview last spring with Chicagoist, Ulrich said, “I think about what the Internet has done for photography that's really wonderful: it has amplified photographys' ability to be propaganda… I'm really trying to promote an ideology and a certain level of thinking and responsibility about consumerism to as many people as possible.”

In that regard, putting his images not only on the internet, but in the places where ads are supposed to be doing their seduction seems like perfect propaganda.

Brian Ulrich earned his MFA at Columbia College Chicago, where he now teaches. Awarded a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, his work has been exhibited at a variety of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Walker Art Center, and has appeared in publications including Adbusters, Mother Jones and the New York Times Magazine. His monograph, Copia, was published by Aperture as part of the MP3: Midwest Photographers Project in 2006.

"...highlight breakthrough design solutions with the power and potential to improve our lives and the world. These designs may improve the human spirit, increase awareness of the environment, or respond to areas of need in the world, whether to provide shelter and clean water or address climate change and humanitarian crises."

11.16.2009

• Krzysztof Wodiczko describes his ICA Boston exhibition, …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project, an immersive soundscape based on soldiers' experiences of attacks in Iraq: “It could be an interior of a soldier who came back from war and who is re-living, remembering, recalling some scenes and moments — perhaps similar to the one that I’m trying to create."Listen to WBUR's segment on the installation.

From Borat to Punk'd to The Yes Men, pranks have really taken off since the early days of adbusted billboards and "subvertisements." But with a surplus of flash mobs, fake newscasts and gag YouTube videos, it's worth asking: have political pranks jumped the, uh, snark?

Dave Gilson ponders the question at Mother Jones, noting that while The Yes Men's 2004 spoof, in which they posed as Dow Chemicals execs to take belated responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, cost that company $2 billion in stock losses, today we're saturated with pranks. He writes:

After [The Yes Men's] unveiling the Halliburton SurvivaBall—a "gated community for one" that turns the wearer into a giant beige gumball—to a roomful of insurance managers, Yes Man No. 2 Mike Bonanno laments, "Instead of freaking out, they just took our business cards. Our effort had been a failure. And come to think of it, all of our efforts had been failures...Maybe making fun of stupid ideas was a stupid idea." After playing the fool for so long, the Yes Men have come to suspect that they've become fools themselves.

Gilson says that pranksterism has become mere entertainment and, along the way, serious intentions behind such acts have, in many cases, been replaced by a serious desire for attention -- quick celebrity. Further, as the hijacked Obama TIME cover -- where he's depicted as Batman's arch-enemy -- suggests, it's no longer the domain of the left. Nothing wrong with rightwingers reading Rules for Radicals to muck up town hall meetings, I suppose, but the fact that they are suggests some of the beloved tactics of the left have, perhaps, outlived their usefulness.